


To Anyone Who Might Care

by TheOceanIsMyInkwell



Series: I'm Peter, I'm 19 and I Never Learned to Read [11]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst with a Happy Ending, Deaf Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Harley Keener & Peter Parker Friendship, Harley Keener is a Good Bro, Humor, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Peter Parker is a Good Bro, Protective Harley Keener, References to Depression, Suicide Attempt, Tony Stark Has A Heart, tony is just a hundred percent done with these little shits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:07:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25120624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOceanIsMyInkwell/pseuds/TheOceanIsMyInkwell
Summary: Several beats too late, Harley finally admits, “No. I’m at NYU. I’m on--don’t be mad. I’m on a roof.”Peter breathes. The sound is deliberate, forced, controlled.“I’m not standing. I’m sitting. I’ve been--painting, actually.”The wind picks up again and whistles, cutting out Harley’s audio on Peter for a second as Spider-Man leaps down toward the glare of late-night traffic and shoots,thwip, thwip, and swings in a beeline toward Manhattan.“You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to come. I just wanted to, like, call you up and see what was going on.” Harley’s voice is overly calm.But inside, he pounds, his everything pounds, and something starts to scream,please come, please come.--Or: 3 times Peter and Harley saved each other, and 1 time Tony saved them both.
Relationships: Harley Keener & Peter Parker, Harley Keener & Peter Parker & Tony Stark, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: I'm Peter, I'm 19 and I Never Learned to Read [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1394110
Comments: 34
Kudos: 121





	To Anyone Who Might Care

**Author's Note:**

  * For [floweryfran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/gifts), [fatiable](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=fatiable).



> heyyy, I'm not actually dead, I've just been distracted a while with work for other fandoms (*cough* SKAM *cough*). The genesis of this one was actually way back in May when I shared with Fran a random dialogue that popped up in my head about Tony's joke about DNA and dumbassery (you'll know it when you see it), and that one snippet has just been sitting in my drafts since then. Until yesterday, when I was suddenly struck by manic creativity to finish this entire thing. I'm...actually kind of proud of it?
> 
> Please scroll down for trigger warnings! Everything's in the tags, but the endnotes have more detailed descriptions.
> 
> Theme song and title inspiration: ["Everything I Wanted" by Billie Eilish](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgBJmlPo8Xw)

**i. Peter**

The thing they don’t tell you about taking a gap year off school to recover is that you waste the majority of your time running around grocery stores in desperate need of that one specific brand of white spaghetti sauce, not flying off to Sicily and enjoying the sun and bumping into life-changing strangers at sweaty tourist spots like in the movies.

This is the first thing that comes to Peter’s mind as he jabs Harley’s speed-dial on his phone screen, and the next unwilling thought that invades Harley’s mind as he picks up.

“Jesus Christ, mother almighty, I was taking a nap,” Harley says, once Peter’s gotten through his stammering explanation of his grocery store conundrum.

“And now you’re not, because you love me and picked up the phone ’cause I need you desperately.”

“What in the fuck-all name of Dairy Queen made you think that _I_ would be the best authority on brands of _white spaghetti sauce_?”

“May doesn’t know shit,” Peter whines, and quite factually so. “She thought we needed to put water in the cheddar broccoli casserole last year. Pepper was my most capable candidate, but she’s probably busy, like, drawing up contracts with investors from New Zealand and she does _not_ need me bearing down on her with domestic bullshit. And, like, Tony--no.”

“Yeah, no,” says Harley. At least that’s one thing they agree on. He creaks upright on the sofa--yes, it’s the permanently dented gray one in Tony’s lab, and yes, he’s been practically living here since Tony left on his ‘quick business trip to Texas’ two days ago, what about it?

As he smacks the palm of his left hand over an eye to clear the cloud over his vision and get a better view at Peter’s puppy-like panic on his phone screen, Harley says slowly, “So why not Ned, ya big dumptruck?”

“Because,” says Peter with emphasis, “Ned is the person I need to cook dinner for, and I very well can’t _hint_ that I need fucking--white spaghetti sauce and then have him come home to something totally _not_ white spaghetti sauce when I inevitably fuck up and have to throw the whole thing out.”

Harley stares at him. “So then why don’t you just buy take-out and call it a day?”

Peter heaves a long-suffering sigh and pins him with a look that lasts exactly three seconds, and it’s times like this that Harley has the frightening revelation that Peter and May are more alike than any two people who share actual DNA.

“I will not be that boyfriend who orders sushi and pretends he made it. Relationships that are built on lies crumble like sand,” Peter says primly.

Harley barely has the decency to suppress his pig-like snort. “Which self-help aisle did you get lost in at Barnes & Noble?”

“Oh, fuck off!” Peter whisper-yells, as a middle-aged mother in an aggressively retro Karen haircut passes by in the background, trailed by her woebegone-looking tween son. At the random boy’s vaguely gleeful look and the woman’s pointedly scandalized expression, Harley snorts again and pulls his lips up in a lazy smile.

“Bold of you to assume I was born with any fucks to give, to begin with.”

“Sheesh, yuck. I forgot how coherent you always are after fifty-three naps and a diet of milkshakes.”

Harley almost wants to flinch, but he knows Peter doesn’t mean anything by the jab. On the contrary, joking about their mutual habit of depression-induced midday naps is a comfort that they share.

“Y’know, for someone who desperately needs my help, you’re doing a real shit job at being nice to me,” Harley observes.

“Fine. _Fine_. You’re my savior. My warrior in white. Please, _please_ just sit up on your lazy butt and tell me what brand of sauce I should get.”

“Um. Well.” Harley digs a crusty out of the corner of his eye and contemplates it on the pad of his finger. “To begin with, you’re in the cereal aisle.”

“I knew that,” Peter mumbles.

“Sure, Jan. Could you grab me some Cocoa Puffs while you’re out there?”

“Use your own billionaire-issued credit card for your junk food,” Peter snorts, overly fondly, as he stomps across the aisle and reaches up to grab the aforementioned Cocoa Puffs off the shelf anyway. “Okay. Where to next, guru?”

“Okay, here’s the hard part, so listen carefully.” Harley taps the side of his nose. “You should just get up, pay for your shit and leave the store, because you ain’t never gonna find a brand of white spaghetti sauce to top the homemade kind.”

Peter stops. And stares. “Harley _James_ Keener, I asked you for _advice_ \--”

“And I gave it.”

“--Just help me, bro, gay bro to gay bro, you’re my savior--”

“Hey, I did say this was the hard part. Bye,” Harley deadpans, making as if to hang up.

“No no no no no--!” Peter stammers. “I’ll be good, I promise. But I shit you not, Harls, I grew up in a Parker household. With _May Parker_. Do you know what that means? My confidence level at putting any more than four ingredients together on a fucking-- _bain-marie_ \--is at negative seventy-five-point-two.”

“You’re a real catch,” Harley says mildly. He swings his legs over the edge of the couch and stuffs his feet into his Adidas. Tugs on the broken and twice-knotted shoelace for good luck, like he’s always done since childhood.

“This is why I’m practicing,” Peter points out. “The things I do for the people I love.”

“I certainly don’t see you having a breakdown in the middle of Trader Joe’s over white spaghetti sauce for _me_ ,” Harley observes, reaching the glass door of the lab and pushing through. The blast of cool air from FRI’s A/C system hits him, and he blinks rapidly to get the dryness out of his eyes. The October chill outside does not seem all that inviting, either, but Harley marches on, grabs his thicker camel denim jacket from the tree coat upstairs and heads for the back door.

“I was referring to the things I do for the people I _love_ ,” Peter underscores. Completely deadpan. The little shit. “Also, next time we’re going grocery shopping I’m making you pay for all my aloe vera juice. You deserve it.”

“Either way, Tony’s credit cards are paying for it, but I appreciate the pettiness,” says Harley with a beatific smile.

“Sometimes the way you talk about his money is so casual it gets slightly concerning.”

“Pshh. As if you haven’t heard me say the same shit to his face. Besides, it’s a nice break for him. We were eating bananas the other day”--at Peter’s raised brow, Harley shoots back a glare--“we were following a _meal plan_ , okay? For--healthy dopamine levels and whatever. Anyway. We were eating bananas at the counter some time ago and he goes, you know, I like the fact that you make fun of my money, ’cause everybody else only ever tries to worship me for it.”

“And Pepper tears her hair out trying to manage it,” Peter rejoins without missing a beat.

Harley shakes his head. “That woman does not tear her hair out. She goes into a single bathroom, locks the door, and starts sharpening the point of her stilettos to chuck at Tony’s effigy.”

“I’m pretty sure they’re in love. She would not do that to his effigy.”

“Sure she would.”

“Scratch that, she would not even have his effigy.”

“Yeah, she would.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve never been in love.”

Harley rolls him a droll look. “Don’t pretend you’ve never told me about your plans to get Ned printed on a huge body pillow.”

“Well, _yes_. For _cuddling_ and all the _normal_ things people in loving relationships do!”

Harley starts to lose it before Peter’s even finished his sentence. “You’re just too easy to rile up, Parker. Geez. How do you even keep your cool when the criminals mouth off at you?”

“This is why I web up their mouths and I do all the talkin’.”

“Sure, tough guy. Hey, look out the window for a minute.” Harley presses his nose against the glass of the grocery storefront, having arrived in record time since he could recognize from the background of the video chat just where Peter was shopping. The establishment is only under five minutes to walk from the Tower, four with Harley’s extra long legs.

Through the droplet-stained window, the fluffy ungelled mess of Peter’s head can be seen whipping about. His lips are pressed in a line of confusion, in that exact expression that Harley loves to tell him looks like he’s got a frog in his mouth.

“What? What.” Peter’s gaze darts about the store. He adjusts his grip on the phone with one hand and the shopping basket with the other. “ _What_. What is it.”

Harley raps on the glass with a knuckle. Peter jumps with the most comical combination of fright and kitten-like indignation on his face.

“What the fuck, what the fuck,” Peter mouths at him. He marches up past the bakery shelves to the glass and levels a glare at Harley through the window. Harley blows a raspberry at him, then mists up the glass with his breath and draws a quick outline of a fist giving Peter the middle finger.

Very deliberately, Peter ends the call, all while maintaining eye contact with Harley. “Don’t you dare come inside,” he signs with his hands.

“And what about the sauce?” Harley signs back. “Harley, one, Peter, zero.”

A curly-mopped kid in an apron and the thirty-two-toothed smile of a new hire startles Peter from behind when he asks cheerily, “Everything good here, sir? Need any help with anything?”

“Naw, no, no, I’m good, I’m good, thanks for--thanks for asking.” Peter reaches up to smooth his hair and picks up his shopping basket again with a jerk, shooting one last glare at Harley.

The bakery kid just raises a single brow between the two of them and...whatever the fuck it is that was going on just now. Oh, great. Yet another person who probably will mistake their dumbassery for a sign that they must be dating.

Harley, shameless heathen that he is, is still cackling into the collar of his jacket when he lopes through the front door and meets an adorably infuriated Peter by the pile of cabbages on sale.

“Oh, c’mon, that’s no way to greet your savior,” Harley drawls. “I just had to stop by and see you making a fool of yourself in person. God. They were right. Live _is_ always better.”

Peter’s look is flat. “Remember when I said that thing about the things I do for the people I love?”

“Oh, yeah. We’ll skip the part where you say that includes ‘putting up with me’, yada yada yada, and go straight to the part where we both realize you love me. Easy. Now where’s the aisle where they keep their real parmesan cheese?”

Peter grumbles under his breath but grudgingly allows his brother to loop his arm through his, heavy basket bumping at their knees and all, as he leads Harley back down the pasta aisle toward the dairy section. He doesn’t know why he was so shocked that Harley actually got off his ass in the middle of his nap and ventured out into the biting autumn just to save him before date night and guide him through a--cooking session, of all things. But as he considers the matter more closely, hanging back a bit behind Harley and watching the taller boy scan the shelves of cheese with an almost comical profundity of concentration, Peter finds it within himself to realize that he wasn’t shocked at all.

He often wonders what they look like to outsiders. No doubt the kid from the bakery read something more than just friendly or familial between them, but that’s just it--they’re family. Family is weird and messy and hard to pin down--never adhering to standard nicknames or the movie-style cues for big group hugs--and sometimes it means the guy you’re closest to will literally pick himself up out of his depression-induced crater, eyebags and potato-chip-smelling hoodie and all, and trek over to the store to make fun of your pain in person.

Harley reaches out and plucks two different parmesan cheese options off the racks. Flips them over and does that ridiculous and incessantly habitual thing where he tries to read both lists of nutrition facts at the same time.

He’s absurd. Absurd in all the best ways possible, and Peter means that with every bit of love and exasperation poured into it at once.

“Hey.” Harley draws him back to the task at hand. 

Peter looks at him, feeling young, caught in the act of drifting off into deeper thoughts while staring at his brother. But unlike anybody else, Harley knows him, and he knows the lines they don’t cross together. They both know what to poke fun at and what to let lie.

This is a moment to let lie.

“This is probably your best bet, if you don’t wanna blow that huge of a hole in Tony’s wallet,” Harley quips, tossing his selection into the basket. “Also, I’m getting some string cheese. Or, like, three. Since I’m already here and I did save you from having a panic attack over dinner.”

The smile he tacks on at the end is easy and light.

It’s the closest they come to acknowledging the truth that, yes, Peter’s call may have been the funniest thing under the sun since his torture recovery and the disastrous game of Catan with Pepper or even the god-forsaken Whisper Challenge video for YouTube. But Peter doesn’t go out on his own all that often, and when he does and he starts to devolve into a panic induced by his sometimes shaky relationship with reality, Harley is one hundred percent his go-to person.

“So are you gonna help me cook this or what?”

Harley raises a finger to correct him. “You’re gonna cook it, I’m gonna crack open some wine and supervise like a good aunt.”

“You mean you’re gonna force me to listen to _your_ playlist and _your_ snotty voice criticizing _my_ noble efforts at cooking my boyfriend dinner.”

“Yeah,” Harley says with zero shame. “And you’re gonna give me leftovers, too.”

\--

**ii. Harley**

The other thing they don’t tell you about recovery is that relapse is not the exception, it’s the rule.

Harley has been to a therapist before. Has been going to one, in fact, as part of his friendly agreement with Tony that, holy shit, talking to someone actually works if you don’t want a repeat of last year when all you wanted to do was throw either your calculus books or yourself off a roof.

And the therapist says: recovery is not linear. 

Like the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.

Little tidbits of unforgettable, unquestionable doctrine. His favorite and most hollow mantra to comfort himself. Sure, recovery isn’t linear, but Harley sure does wonder why it feels like a fucking golden spiral on his worst days.

The nice thing about going to NYU for his do-over at college is that it’s less than forty minutes of a commute in typical Manhattan traffic, which means that Harley makes his bed at the Tower every night. After talking to Sally so-and-so at the Center for Students with Disabilities and going through the painfully embarrassing process of emailing his diagnoses of ‘clinical depression, anxiety, hard of hearing’ to the appropriate offices, Harley received approval for his request to enroll in three courses this semester instead of four. Most days he plods across campus with the stone-like weight of guilt in his chest for being a fraud, a fraud who gets by with so many accommodations, but when the hours tick by and the sun has skirted overhead and he comes home to collapse on Tony’s couch with barely enough strength left in his hands to cushion his own fall, Harley regrets even enrolling in the third class.

Intro to Art History. Intro to Media Studies. The random Spanish class that he will not ask Peter for help with, because yes, he needs his gen eds and no, he will not bother Peter in the middle of his whole...post-torture ordeal to make flashcards with him on vocabulary for Venezuelan cuisine.

And so he takes to spending late nights on the roof of his favorite tall building on the campus of NYU, overlooking the cluster of the medical school facilities, and starts camping out there with a couch cushion and a blanket and his study materials and paint supplies.

Technically, Peter still lives with him and Tony at the same Tower, but the nights that the boys actually see each other awake are becoming rarer with Peter’s increased time patrolling Queens and his tendency to make frequent visits up to Ned and MJ at MIT and Harvard. So it’s not unusual or deliberate _at all_ , Harley tells himself, that Peter doesn’t know about his most recently developed nighttime habit.

He’s not hiding. He has nothing to hide.

Except that he does, because he may have spent twenty years repressing shit when letting his emotions show could blow everything stable he ever had with his mother Rose and sister Charlie, but now when he’s alone and he’s been letting his guard down around his therapist, everything comes to the fore with the force of an army of chariots.

At first he only goes up to his special rooftop once every week or so. And then midterms hit, and Peter disappears more often, and Pepper and Tony are off at some charity summit in the Netherlands, and Harley stops coming home to the Tower every night. Instead, his steps turn to the gargantuan climb up the wide and lonely stairwell and up and up and up, past the phantom echo of someone humming three floors down, up to his favorite rooftop.

It’s a Thursday night when it happens. When he loses control, digs for his phone, and dials Peter without thinking. Later he will blame the nip of October freezing his brains right out of his skull, but in that moment he’s more connected to the truth than he’ll ever be again, probably, and deep down he knows it’s because no one else knows about his dangerous affinity for rooftops.

Not firsthand, not like the way Peter knows him.

“You should call me more often,” is Peter’s breathless greeting to him as soon as Karen picks up the call. “I was starting to think it wasn’t cool anymore to hang out on the comms with your favorite superhero.”

Harley pauses for the space of a breath, and then manages to choke out: “Fuck you. My favorite superhero is Black Panther.”

“I’d pretend to be hurt, but actually? Yeah. He’s really fucking cool.” Peter huffs over the line and thumps as he lands somewhere.

Harley sets down his paintbrush with a clink. He tries not to close his eyes, not to imagine Peter perched on a rooftop some dozen miles away in an eerie mirror of his own position now.

“Soo,” says Peter. “What’re you up to? Are you...inside?”

The fact that Peter doesn’t immediately launch into a report of the craziest scalies and furries he had to hash it out with this past week, and that he hesitates before his last word, clues Harley in to the realization that Peter’s probably already heard the whip of wind over the connection on Harley’s end. Damn Spidey hearing.

“Yes,” Harley says automatically. And then, “No.”

Peter hums. Harley can practically hear the Tony-esque expression settling over his face, even behind his mask, trying to school his visage into something neutral. He wonders if he’s just hallucinating the way he senses Peter’s heart rate pick up.

“You by the Tower?”

Harley knows it’s a bunch of bullshit. By this time, Peter has already tracked Harley’s call through Karen’s systems--he shares a lot more of Tony’s nervous and overmonitoring tics than he’ll ever admit--and he knows Harley is still somewhere on campus at half past one in the morning.

At this age, having gone through the first year of college and spent nights together filled with sloppy ramen and spicy experimental hot cocoa and late-night walks by the sorority parties and accidentally falling asleep in the basement of the library, Harley and Peter both know that 1:30 in the morning isn’t all that late. But now, tonight, in the shakiness of his hands and his aloneness, it feels later than ever to Harley, late enough that his mouth threatens to open up and spill all his secrets to Spider-Man.

Several beats too late, Harley finally admits, “No. I’m at NYU. I’m on--don’t be mad. I’m on a roof.”

Peter breathes. The sound is deliberate, forced, controlled.

“I’m not standing. I’m sitting. I’ve been--painting, actually.”

The wind picks up again and whistles, cutting out Harley’s audio on Peter for a second as Spider-Man leaps down toward the glare of late-night traffic and shoots, _thwip, thwip_ , and swings in a beeline toward Manhattan.

“You don’t have to worry. You don’t have to come. I just wanted to, like, call you up and see what was going on.” Harley’s voice is overly calm.

But inside, he pounds, his everything pounds, and something starts to scream, _please come, please come_.

Peter doesn’t respond to that. “So--uh--what are you painting?”

Harley chokes a little, because he almost wasn’t expecting Peter to be listening to the trivial things he said on the surface. “Uh...nothing major. Just some portraits ’n’ stuff. I’ve been doing this, um, series. Portraits of people from behind. See if I can--recognize them in a crowd.”

Peter clearly doesn’t know the right thing to say to that, but he tries his damnedest. “Is it something for class?”

No. No, of course not, dummy. Peter knows Harley is taking intro to art history, for Christ’s sake. There’s no lab component to the course. But Peter’s tone is taking on a new attentiveness, a feel of the overly deliberate, and Harley hates it, he hates that this is the second time he’s managed to hear Peter sound this way around him and he hates that he’s the one who kicks Peter into superhero drive when he gets like this. Peter has already talked down his fair share of people from bridges and windows and rooftops--grandfathers, nieces, brothers, sisters, mothers, lost teens, orphaned dads--and it’s not _fair_ that his own brother makes him do this with him, too.

Harley rests his head on the concrete railing and wonders what would have happened if he had called Tony, instead, that first night on the roof of the parking garage at MIT.

He wonders if he’d still be able to look Peter in the eye after that. After withholding that night from him.

Either way, sometimes he stumbles on these moments of clarity so deep it stabs him in the gut, and he’ll be at the breakfast bar across from Peter who’s bickering about something with Tony while slicing up fruit in hideously uneven squares to cut out the rotten parts, and Harley will be filled with a guilt so wide and deep that it drowns him alive and he can’t look his brother in the fucking eye.

“Harley?”

“Sorry,” he mumbles. “Got lost looking at the stars.”

For a moment, Peter’s superhero persona recedes and he snorts. “Good luck with that in New York Fucking City.”

Harley snorts back. It almost feels good, it almost--he almost feels something.

“It’s not for class. Just a personal project,” he answers softly, instead.

“I’m here,” Peter says a beat later, and his voice isn’t tinny over the phone anymore, it’s quiet and real but so _loud_ at the same time, in the midst of it all.

Harley sits up with a crick in his spine. Spider-Man is crouched on the opposite corner of the concrete railing, untangling his legs, hopping down onto the floor with grace. Harley forgets to hang up the call until Peter speaks again and he hears two of them at once.

“Jesus, when you said you were painting portraits, I thought you meant on a bunch of _canvas_.”

Peter finally, finally yanks his mask off, and the autumn wind blows back a clump of his curls instantly and sticks it to the side of his temple. The sweat looks like it’s about to freeze in dewdrops on his brow.

That drives Harley to get up on his knees and shove a bundle of fleece at Peter. “Here, I’ve got blankets. Sit down.”

“Dork,” Peter says smartly, with a nod at Harley’s haphazard camp of blankets and cushions in the corner.

“Moron,” says Harley.

Peter pulls the olive fleece around himself more tightly. His footsteps thud as he crosses the distance between them, hops over the fresh painting on the concrete, and settles on the nearest available blanket pile.

Harley watches him from the side of his eye and fiddles with the volume on his hearing aids as Peter makes himself comfortable. A truck horn blares somewhere down below, but it hardly fazes them. Not even Harley, fish-out-of-water Tennesseean country mouse that he is. He tries to imagine now that he can hear some city crickets, maybe some friendly rats down in the streets below them, chittering while the Benz with the booming bass breezes through another red light.

He blinks. Peter blinks. They draw breaths in tandem.

Peter finally moves to point with his booted foot. “How long did it take you to do that one?”

He’s referring to the first one Harley ever set down with paint to concrete. The rear shot of Peter Parker, recognizable only by the cowlick at the back of his head that doesn’t get flattened without gel, and the denim jacket with the age-old pun _I Need Some Space_ on the back.

“Two days,” says Harley. He breathes. He points to the next one, which is the back of Tony’s head and took forever and a half to perfect because it gets surprisingly impossible to remember the exact shade of dark coffee brown of your mentor’s hair when your eyes are clouded by tears. “That one took almost four. Fucker’s hair had to be ridiculously perfect.”

Peter cackles softly at his side. Even that sounds careful, measured. Harley imagines there’s an air of silent apology after the sound, but he can’t be too sure. Still, he trusts he knows Peter well enough.

“And that one’s Charlie?” Peter toes this time at the brunette with a complicated mass of butterfly clips in her braids.

“Obviously. And Momma’s over there.”

“Obviously.”

They lapse into silence, not naturally, as their gazes drift to Harley’s latest project but neither make mention of it. It’s the half-finished portrait of a light brown head, wavy in parts just like Harley’s when he’s been out in the sun or on the creeper under the truck for too long. There’s the chalk outline of the droopy shoulders of a flannel shirt, not yet painted in.

Finally Peter speaks up, “He looks kinda green in some parts.”

“His head looked kinda green sometimes, I dunno, I don’t know what to tell ya,” Harley says quickly, before Peter has even finished speaking, like he was just waiting for Peter to bring it up to trigger that well of everything unsaid inside him.

“You probably need to add some red. Or--or not. Paint him like Shrek, then, I don’t care, it’s your project.”

“I wouldn’t sully your precious childhood memories with Shrek like that.”

“Nope. Leave him all green and call it Shrek Keener. See if I care.”

So Peter does know who it is.

This is why Harley sometimes regrets being attracted to hanging out with geniuses.

Harley breathes. Peter breathes. The sounds fall heavy from their noses.

“How long have you been coming up here, Harls?”

“Since last month,” Harley says quietly, and he feels like a traitor for the silence of all that time.

“Have you--ever--or--”

“No. Not--not really. Never seriously. I really just come up here to paint.”

“Oh, okay. That’s--um.” Great, a relief, really good to hear, are probably all the things Peter was about to say. Instead, what comes out is: “That sounds healthy.” Healthier than the alternative.

“I sure hope so,” Harley says, in the specific tone of voice he reserves for Vine references, but it falls flat because he sounds too tired.

“So why did you decide to...share this with me?”

Because I never meant to hide it from you in the first place, is Harley’s answer. “It gets hard to think about this all alone, sometimes. It feels kinda--huge, I guess.”

Neither of them charge directly into the implication that Harley only really needed to hear Peter’s voice and feel his shivering warmth at his side when he couldn’t get through a stupid portrait of his father.

“So Tony doesn’t know?”

“Nope. You think he’d be able to keep that shit from you?”

“You’d be surprised how hard he’ll try for his ‘favorite menaces’,” Peter quips, but he nods and grins in acquiescence.

“Thanks for this, by the way.”

“Hey, I’m the one getting free blankets and an art exhibit. I should be thanking you.” Peter stifles a yawn. “This is way better than chasing weird costumed guys down alleys and tryna decide if they’re villains in the making or just the regular New York weirdos.”

Harley digs a nail under his cuticle and scrubs the dried splash of burnt umber from there. The silence stretches.

And then he opens his mouth and sucks in a breath and speaks in a rush, in a total non-sequitur: “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell my therapist about my dad. I don’t think I’ll ever be ready. I’ll be--in a cap and gown, maybe, by some miracle, marching down to the gate with you and Tony and Pepper tryna get all my angles in the camera or some shit, and then I’ll remember, fuck, I never told Tim about my dad, and I’ll be like, hold on, wait, lemme return this diploma real quick so I can run back to his office and avail of one last session with him. And then I’ll be standin’ outside his door for a solid ten minutes when he opens it ’cause I do that all the time and he knows I’m there waiting. Then I’ll just stare at him like an idiot and be like, uh, I’m graduating. And never fucking say a word about my dad to him.”

Peter curls up next to him and hooks a leg over Harley’s knee.

“And weirdly enough, you’re the only person I can talk to about my dad, apparently, which is all sorts of fucked up. My sister had the same dad but I can’t even get on this level of conversation with her without--bein’ afraid of fucking up her head or something. And Momma already suffered way too much shit with him so she’s the last person I’d like to dig all that up with. ’Sides, she’s somehow under the impression I’ve got the emotional intelligence of a brick, so comin’ at her all tears and trauma is definitely gonna rock her world.”

Harley tries for a grin. He likes to think Peter can sense it, even if neither of them is looking at the other.

“Like, why you? No offense, but you don’t even have a dad, and it’s not because he walked out, it’s because he died doing _good_ shit for a good cause. You and your momma both.”

“Yeah, well, maybe we’re both orphans, just in different ways.” Peter sniffs. Roots around for a second blanket and tosses it around them both. “Ever tried talking to Tony about it?”

It’s logical, really. Tony was the one slapped away and pushed out by his father, the man who claimed in lip service that Tony was his world but never fucking acted like he believed it. It would make sense to come to Tony with this, then. But--

“That’s so fucking weird,” Harley says. A little loudly. “That’s so--he’s like our, you know.”

Our actual dad.

Peter laughs under his breath. “Okay, point freaking taken.” He grows still and lax against Harley. “Just--you know I didn’t mean to push you away, right? I was just wondering. But...I’m really glad you trust me with this.”

“Yeah.”

“And I don’t want you to ever feel like you need to, to--come to a rooftop all on your own because it’s getting loud in there.” Peter moves his head to gesture at Harley’s own head. “I mean, you are stealing my brand, after all.”

Harley’s answering smile is brave but wan.

“Keep going, then. Sorry for interrupting.”

“’Sfine.” Harley picks up his paintbrush next and starts swirling it around in his plastic Chinese takeout container of water to get the bits of green out. The movement calms him somewhat.

“I think what I really hated was that I never knew what he thought was good. He’d be so specific one minute, like, just do this _one_ thing right, just wash the dishes in the order I asked you to this _one_ time, and you can consider yourself fully kitchen-trained and--yeah. And then the next week, after I’ve been doing the dishes exactly as he liked for eight straight days, he’d pick up on something else entirely and never say a word about how I did the other thing right. It would always be about not sweeping the mower blades right or leaving the dirty slippers under the key rack where the dish towel could fall from or--or--Christ. Jesus _fucking_ Christ.” Harley slaps his hands over his eyes, staving off the pressure threatening to burst there.

He hears what he sounds like. He hears how petty his examples sound, how the remembrances of a nine-year-old shape these snippets of uneasy domesticity with far too much significance, and he’s used to this, he’s used to doubting himself, thinking maybe, maybe, maybe he imagined it all and made up his whole entire fucking trauma.

“I started hating myself for it,” Harley says behind his hands. “Bein’ so quiet around him. I woke up one day realizing that it didn’t even matter whether I was good or not, I was gonna be at the sharp end of his fist anyway, so I thought--fuck it--why don’t I go be fucking rebellious and--steal his car and mouth back to him and shit. And then the next day he was gone. Fucking gone. Like a joke from the universe, like oops, haha, you’ll never get your chance to say no to him now.”

Peter starts to quiver beside him.

“Sorry, sorry,” Harley chants under his breath.

“No. I’m sorry.” Peter unhooks his leg from over Harley’s thigh, so he can crawl up on his own knees and face Harley when he says what he says next. “You don’t have to be sorry for anything.”

“I just meant--like--I’m sorry that I’m still so hung up on him. That I’m...here at a great school and I have you guys, you and Tony, looking after everythin’ I could possibly need, and life is sort of okay, but I still see him in everything I do.” And then Harley amends: “In everything I didn’t do.”

“This is why we talk about shit,” says Peter. “So you can start to not see him in everything you do. Because--shit, Harls. Everything you do is just _you_ , not him, and it’s amazing.”

Peter is not the first one who has said similar things to Harley, not by a long shot. Rose said it to him, almost every morning before she left for work, and Charlie would say it in that funny way of hers that was half-sarcasm and half-truth. And Tony would say it in a rare moment of vulnerability and so would May, with a quick peck on the top of his head and a plate of home-burnt cookies, and so would MJ with an exasperated roll of her eyes.

But Peter says it, he’s saying it tonight, and somehow, he’s the only one Harley believes.

Harley’s breath comes in a rasp. He feels naked. Seen. And it’s terrifying beyond measure.

“ _God_ ,” says Harley, obnoxiously loud. “I’m startin’ to see what you were on about, about burning your lacrimal glands.”

Peter gives a half-crazed giggle.

“Hey,” Harley says. “Hey.” He swallows around the wet lump in his throat.

“Yeah?”

“Remember when you first met me in person? I mean--not the part in the police station where Tony was giving me his jacket. After that. In the hotel.”

Peter’s eyes light with the memory. “Yeah.”

“Could you--” Harley chokes on himself. He sees the distance between him and what he wants, and he decides to be brave and shameless this once, and sticks his hand out from under the edge of the blanket.

Peter understands him perfectly. He grabs Harley’s hand and lets their fingers fold together like they first did that night in the hotel room, when Tony and Pepper and May and Rose were on the other end of the suite, too far away and too fast asleep to hear the quiet sobs rocking Harley’s body. And only Peter was there in the bed beside him to hear and to listen, and to hold him for a little while by intertwining their hands.

Harley sags bodily, completely, into him, and Peter props up the cushions at a better angle behind them against the concrete wall. Then he drops his cheek onto the top of Harley’s head and lets out a sigh he wasn’t even aware of.

“We might fall asleep here,” Peter whispers.

“Sorry,” Harley mumbles.

“No. It’s fine. I think it--would be nice.”

Harley’s grip on Peter’s hand tightens infinitesimally.

“We could see the sunrise, maybe,” Peter elaborates.

Harley thinks he would like that. God, he would like that very much.

\--

**iii. Peter**

Harley is, for once, not asleep when Peter rings him again.

It’s just past nine in the evening, and Harley is actually at home in his room in the Tower, door kicked wide open and Foster the People drumming in his headphones as he shuffles through his notes across the bedspread. He has an ungodly habit of grabbing the wrong notebook for the wrong class for the day, and then tearing out the pages and trying to tape them up in the right notebook, then giving up and simply taking out a purple binder to snap them into. Inevitably, he gets distracted by the urge to fill in his half-finished doodles in the margins as he does so.

His screen flashes brightly to let him know of Peter’s incoming call. He drops his felt-tip marker and scoops up the phone, frowning just a second when he notices it’s a voice call this time and not video. He slips off his headphones and lets them fall around his neck, and then slides up the volume of his hearing aids and picks up.

“Hi,” Peter breathes, before Harley can say anything. “Um. Hi. I’m gonna sound lame.”

“That’s on the daily, this ain’t news to me,” Harley quips.

Peter doesn’t respond to the banter. It seems like he’s biting his lip. “Um.”

Something in Harley folds in realization. He sits up straighter, pushes aside the binder in front of him. “What is it?”

“Can you--talk me down?”

“Down? Down from what? Where are you.” Harley’s body jumps into overdrive before his heart can catch up. The result is a disconcerting combination of rising panic and deadly calm. He stuffs his feet into any pair of shoes--doesn’t matter what--and starts down the hallway.

“I’m not--anywhere. I didn’t mean it like that. Just, just--tell me about your day?”

“My day sucked,” Harley says candidly. “Do you want the Cliffnotes or the unabridged version with MLA citation?”

There’s a suspicious sound like a sniffle. Harley tenses, wondering if he should ignore it. Peter takes forever to answer.

“Depends on if the unabridged version has exciting tea.”

Harley thinks for a minute. He pulls the phone away from his ear for a minute to turn on FRIDAY’s cellphone tracking interface and pinpoint Peter’s location. “Uh. Yeah, there was drama. It was art drama. I dunno, it might go over your whole...astrophysics-and-engineerin’ brain.”

A small smile makes its appearance in Peter’s voice for the first time. “Tell me the art drama. It’ll help to...have to figure out the shit you’re saying.”

It’s bad, then. Harley curses to himself a little for not asking sooner, when he had a chance, exactly what’s going on with Pete. But he has FRI tracking him down, now, and he has a credit card and he’s flagging down an Uber, so there are definitely worse ways this night could have gone.

“Okay, first of all, my media studies prof had the audacity to pass judgment on Fourth World Cinema, and like, maybe she wasn’t expecting a bunch of freshmen to have read any Ella Shoham or Faye Ginsburg but like? Remember that thing I was telling you about that I did for my senior project back at Rose Hill, where I interviewed my buddy Andrew about his webshow on life in the Navajo Nation? That semi-fictionalized dark comedy he was into…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that,” Peter says softly, sounding more Queens-like than ever in the night.

“Right. So I was read up on my sources. And then she comes up and starts the lecture and we’re not even supposed to be talking about Fourth World Cinema, it’s just something she mentions in passing, and then Cindy raised her hand and asked a question so I thought it was gonna be good and I was _so_ glad I brought the new pens with me so I could take extra good notes--anyway. Not the point. One minute she’s all about the ‘movement to give voice and agency’ and whatnot and then the next she’s on about ‘the difficulties of melding modernity with antiquity’ and. Like. That’s bullshit, right? Bullshit. How the fuck did she get her PhD in what’s-up-her-arse and get a specialization in independent cinema without _once_ coming across some sensible-ass opinions on indigenous films?”

Peter breathes down the line. Harley thinks he might be halfway to bursting out laughing, or breaking down crying, or both.

“It sounds like she didn’t read any of the stuff you read at all,” is what Peter says through his snot.

“Exactly. So I put on my best voice all, like, innocent and unassuming, because I don’t wanna be _that_ motherfucker that everyone in the class hates until December, but she was so condescending. Like. She even wondered where on earth I came up with my information, seeing as I was ‘coming in as a transfer from an engineering school’. Like what the _fuck_.”

Peter grunts in agreement.

“Like, news flash, the reason I transferred from engineering school in the first place was because this is the shit I like to study instead. She said she wanted to talk to me after class, but fortunately Jack got my back and he swarmed her with questions and I got out by the skin of my teeth. And then I ran into Simon--like--actual, full-on, head-butt ran into him--but, uh. That’s all for the footnotes, anyway.”

“What the hell, Harls,” Peter says, sounding petulant more than anything else, now. Harley rejoices internally. “What the heck. You don’t just leave the narrative on the best part.”

“I’m not leaving it, I’m divvying it up into serials. First you gotta give me something.”

“My night sucked,” Peter says flatly. “There was no--tea to it. It just sucked. I dunno what you’re looking for.”

Harley sighs. “Pete, just--tell me a little bit of what’s going on.”

Peter doesn’t answer. Instead, he says, “Are you driving? Harls, put down the phone!”

“No, dingus, I’m in an Uber. I’m on my way to surprise your sorry spandex ass with roses and chocolates and handcuffs to drag you home.”

“I’m allergic to roses.”

“Yeah, ’cause that was the most important part of my last sentence.” Harley rolls a look heavenward.

“And stop pulling my leg, you never buy chocolates. You only eat the ones you can grab for free from the candy jar at the DMV.”

“Maybe I’m buying chocolates this time for my bestest friend in the world,” Harley says, sounding extraordinarily put-upon and hurt.

Peter answers with a barking laugh. It’s rough, and his throat sounds a little raw, but it’s good to hear over the tinny speaker. “The day you do that is gonna be the day May and Happy stop calling me Mr. Peter-Tingle.”

A sharp whine of a snicker escapes Harley. “Okay, so no chocolates. But the metaphorical handcuffs still stand.”

“I can chuck a ten-ton cement truck into the Hudson. I don’t know why I let you bully me like this.”

“My therapist told me we have a co-dependency,” Harley says sagely.

“Shut up. You’re still not getting out of telling me about your run-in with Simon.”

“Tell me what you’re doing, first.”

Just like that, the jesting air between them deflates. 

Harley waits for about twelve seconds, which in real-time human interaction feels just plain awful. “Or...not,” he says slowly. “I’m getting to you in a couple minutes, anyway. Just thought...y’know. You might wanna warn a guy. If there’s, like, a body to be buried or not.”

The joke falls flat.

“Pete?”

“There almost was,” says Peter.

Harley uncurls his grip on the handle of the car door and counts as he breathes. _Almost_. Almost is...good. “But you saved them, Pete.”

“I almost didn’t. I wasn’t--I almost wasn’t fast enough.”

It hits Harley then that this isn’t his first rodeo with Peter and his _bad things happen because of me_ mantra. But it’s the first time without Tony fronting the damage, letting Pete’s body collapse against his chest as he stumbles out of Spider-Man’s suit into Peter Parker’s insecurities. And the realization makes Harley feel like this is in some way his maiden voyage, and his next words could fall to the bottom of the river like stone.

“Okay,” Harley says, very intelligently. “Okay, um. We’re not gonna think about that right now, okay? The fact is you saved them. Listen, I’m like five minutes out now, you think you can hang on for me till then? I’m--this is definitely a conversation I wanna have with you when you’re not hanging off a bridge.”

Peter falls quiet, stunned. It’s clear he didn’t know Harley knew, despite the fact that they have the same access to FRI’s GPS systems.

Harley guesses Peter’s nerves must be just as frazzled as his own now. He wishes he actually did think to stop by the kitchen and snag some chocolates, now.

“Miss Carol?” Harley raises his voice toward the driver. “You think you can put on a nice low-key playlist or something and crank the volume up? Thank you _so_ much.”

He taps the phone to put it on speaker and lets it rest there on his knee, forcing his mind away from the fact that it trembles too much and the gel corner of the phone case rattles against his bones.

\--

Harley can’t tell if Peter has moved further back from the edge of the bridge when he walks up, since FRIDAY’s tracking dot isn’t all that detailed, but he can tell that Peter isn’t in any immediate danger of plunging over the edge. Pete has his back to him, turned away slightly with his head slumped in the cradle of his arms against the railing, training his eyes, presumably, on the winking lights along the river’s edge below.

As Harley’s sneaker crunches on some loose gravel, Peter swivels his head so he is facing his brother and his other cheek rests on his arms. He scuffs the boot of his Spidey suit against the concrete ledge once, twice.

“You got on the wrong shoes,” Peter observes, eyes dipping down to Harley’s feet.

Harley doesn’t even follow his gaze. He realized this fifteen minutes ago, halfway through his Uber ride. One would think with all his other senses making up for his loss of hearing, he’d have learned by now to actually look when he’s stuffing his feet somewhere and make sure he isn’t sporting a daring couture combo of orange Adidas and purple New Balance.

“The things I do for the people I love,” Harley says instead.

Inexplicably, that makes Peter flinch.

“C’mon,” says Harley. “We should get you home.” He reaches Pete’s side at last, and brushes the side of his arm against the other boy’s. Harley keeps his hands tucked in the pockets of his varsity jacket but aches to just yank the kid into a hug a mile long and a channel wide.

Peter seems to sense the thought, somehow. He inches one hand closer and flicks at a loose thread on the elbow patch of Harley’s jacket. When it doesn’t come free, he lets his fingers curl up and rest there in the pocket of warmth of Harley’s arm.

“Is Tony home?” Peter asks in a small voice.

“Yeah,” says Harley. “He’s watching _Westworld_ with Pep.”

Peter snorts. A beat later, so does Harley.

“Do I need to tell him about this?”

Harley considers his words very carefully. “I think...nothin’ will be hurt if you don’t tell him. But you might regret it later on if you keep quiet.”

Peter shuffles closer. Of his own accord, he nuzzles the side of his face into the crook of Harley’s suede-clad elbow. Slowly, Harley draws his right hand from his pocket and lets it rest on the top of Peter’s sweat-frozen curls.

“Just layin’ out your options,” Harley says.

“Yeah,” says Pete. “Yeah.”

“Is this where it happened?”

Is this where it was _almost_?

Peter nods into his arm. “He looked a lot like Ben.”

Suddenly, Harley feels very ridiculous in his orange and purple sneakers. He feels absurd, for the chocolate jokes and quips about roses, and letting Miss Carol play “Baby Shark” on repeat for Peter in the car. He feels--he feels like he should have taken his time getting out of the Tower, put on something more solemn, maybe, packed a bottle of Voss water or something. It feels momentous, accidentally so, and Harley is wholly inadequate.

“Same age and all?”

“Yeah. He was playing John Farnham on his phone and having a smoke because he said he wanted to have one last good memory to throw out there into the universe.”

Harley watches their breaths puff out and drift in tandem into the smudged horizon. Everything begins to smell like ice. 

“Did he listen to you?”

Peter shakes his head. “I couldn’t even--speak.”

A part of Harley wonders if it was the mutism or the good old-fashioned shock.

“I just...I dunno. Sat a bit aways from him and let him talk it out. I couldn’t even say anything. We must’ve been here for hours.”

Christ, Harley thinks, now is not the time to be stingy with his warmth. He dislodges Peter’s head from his left arm momentarily so he can free his hand from his pocket and wrap himself around the other boy, totally, bodily, completely.

“I don’t think I can repeat any of the stuff he said,” Pete says by way of apology.

“’Sokay. He probably wouldn’t want you to, anyway. That’s between him and you.”

“I guess. It feels--huge, though.”

A callback to their other rooftop conversation. Something huge to bear alone.

“He trusted you.”

Peter’s body shakes a little. Harley doesn’t think he’s crying, not with tears, anyway, but it’s November and everything feels about as fragile as a leaf out here.

“So did he just...what? Get up and leave?”

“Yeah. He said thanks, and he gave me his cigarette, which I didn’t know what to fucking do with so I chucked it in the river. He almost looked like he wanted to give me his phone, too, but he didn’t, which made me real glad, ’cause anything else would’ve been a bad sign.”

“You saved him,” says Harley.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.”

“No, I didn’t. He just talked at me until he got tired and I--never made sure he was actually okay and he wasn’t just walking away because he couldn’t take me being there anymore.”

“I’m tellin’ you, you did something for him,” Harley insists. He squeezes Peter’s shoulder, shakes him a little. “People in that--frame of mind…they don’t always need advice. He just needed an ear to listen.”

Pete’s breath clouds up and clings to the air in front of them, still and ethereal. “But what if it wasn’t enough?” 

“Listen,” Harley says fiercely. “Spider-Man ain’t just about webs and chasing muggers and mouthing off at Iron Man. As entertaining as it is on a daily basis...no. Some of your most important work is when nobody else is lookin’. When somebody just needs an ear and a shoulder to lean on.”

 _Like you_ , Peter’s silence seems to say. _Like you and me together._

“I was so scared,” Pete whispers. “I thought the universe was giving me a second chance, and here I was just--fucking it all up. He’d just get up and jump off, and...I’d be sitting there doing nothing.”

“He looked like Ben. So of course you froze.”

“I don’t freeze. Spider-Man doesn’t--there’s just. No excuses.”

“Jesus,” Harley swears. “You know your name is also Peter Parker, right?”

Peter turns his head to squint up at Harley. His eyes are puffy and shiny in the night lights, but still narrow enough to draw a huff from Harls.

“C’mon, we’re actually freezing our silk-spinnin’ asses off up here. We need to get you back home. I bet everything’ll start to feel better once we start walking.”

Peter disentangles himself from Harley for a second to swipe at his eyes with his forearms. “You think so?”

“I promise.”

“Can we get hot chocolate on the way home?”

“You read my mind.”

“And I was serious about the roses being a death trap for my allergies, but maybe if Stop & Shop is still open we can get some daisies?” Peter slips easily into the extra hoodie that Harley brought out for him. “I mean. Not for me. For May. I haven’t made her a wreath in a while.”

“Whatever you want, flower boy,” Harls says flippantly. They link arms and start the trek down the south side of the bridge.

“Thanks for coming out.”

Harley shrugs. “I figured you might not be in a condition for swinging.”

“Yeah, walking’s...nice sometimes.”

“Would be nicer if you put your superstrength to good use and just carried me while you’re at it.”

“Every time you do something nice and I compliment you for it, you just _have_ to go and ruin it.”

Harley drawls, “That’s just par for the course with the Keeners, baby.”

“I’m telling Tony you picked a fight with your prof over the ‘tension between modernity and antiquity’ in Fourth World Cinema.”

Harley huffs. “Bo-ring. I’m telling him about the time you bought two cases of Taquitos and camped out in the supply closet in the upstairs lab for two and a half days straight.”

“Okay, first of all, it was finals week, and secondly, you swore to a pact of secrecy. And you ate more than _half_ of those fucking Taquitos.”

Harley snickers. “He probably wouldn’t even bat an eyelash. I guarantee you he’s blown up something at least once at MIT. He gets real pale and sketchy-looking every time we pass by the labs.”

That draws an easy laugh from somewhere deep within Peter’s chest. It sounds lighter and freer than any sound he’s made tonight.

“I’m glad I got you to tell this shit to,” he says after a lull. They’re standing on a random curb now, Harley tapping at his screen to check on the location of their next Uber.

Harley considers another irreverent jest, but the look of anticipation in the pale cast of Peter’s face against the crimson stoplight ahead of them makes him stop.

“Yeah, me too,” he says. “Something about heights, I guess.”

He doesn’t elaborate, but both of them understand his clear reference to the fact that these are the things that remain hidden between them, the things they see from atop roofs and bridges at the dark hours of the day.

“Can I--tell you something else?”

“Sure, yeah. Anything. Jesus, Pete.”

“He said I’d probably seen so many people die, and why should I have to care about him, I was just another face on another patrol.”

The car they’re waiting for pulls up with a rumble on the asphalt. Harley winces and pulls open the back door. Peter stands, looking at him over the top of the door, one foot off the curb and the other still on it, and they stare at each other like that for a moment with the engine running in their ears and the glass between them.

“So I took off my mask and let him--he--saw my face. I think I was crying, just a little.”

Harley doesn’t know why Pete is telling him this, at first. He doesn’t think Peter seems particularly concerned about his identity being leaked. But the moment seems significant enough to him--to Peter, not to Spider-Man--that Harley nods.

“Then you did something for him,” says Harley.

Peter moves, then, and they both get into the car and Peter is the one to rattle off the directions to their new driver, while Harley sits back and stares at a spot on the back of Pete’s shoulder in silence.

\--

**\+ i. Peter and Harley**

On the first of December, Peter swings by the NYU campus and meets Harley outside the building of his last class of the afternoon, and they trudge around in the snow with ruddy cheeks and smelly armpits underneath their layers of polyester and wool. Harley knows Peter for the haphazard and forgetful brain that he is, so he always comes prepared with a stash of extra civvies for Peter for when he comes by to pick him up from campus.

They stop first by a group of kids rolling a gigantic and muddy snowball across the grounds in front of one of the dorms. Peter shows off a teeny bit of his superstrength and launches it toward the perfect corner, while the kids erupt in rowdy cheers and holler all hoarse and wild into their scarves.

Harley hauls him away with a roll of his eyes, and drags him to the nearest dining hall where he promises he’s actually discovered the best coffee and cookies to grace this god-forsaken, truck-honking, foot-smelling paradise of a campus.

On their way there, they pass inevitably by the tower where Harley’s friend Jack lives, and he can’t help but flit his eyes up to the window on the twelfth floor and dwell a little in the remembrance of the day in September when Jack first let him in for their group study and all he could think of was how convenient the distance was between the window and the ground below.

This is another thing they don’t tell you about recovery. How you will make pacts with death in different buildings you pass through on your daily commute, some less serious than others, and you will start to drift away from the need and compulsion to jump, but the ghost of the contract still shudders through you a little bit every time you walk by.

Peter doesn’t seem to notice Harley’s steps slowing or his gaze being drawn upward. Even if he does, he’s gotten eerily good at not pushing on the days when Harley doesn’t want to be pushed.

“What,” he says suddenly, “the fuck is that?”

Harley hears the crunch of Peter’s footsteps halting and follows where the other boy’s finger is pointing upward. Tangled in a tree, front wheel still spinning and spokes glinting in the bright white of their surroundings, is a Huffy bike.

Harley honks in laughter. “It’s finals week, baby. Shit gets crazy.”

“But-- _how_ \--do they even get it up there?!”

“Maybe you’re not the only mutant runnin’ around the Big Apple,” says Harley with a nudge at Peter’s ribs. He wrinkles his nose. “For real, though. Beats me how they get that shit up there without breaking any bones.”

Peter is practically vibrating at his side. “How are you so calm about this.”

“I’ve been seeing them all around campus since last week. You should see the one over by the north dining hall, that tree is massive and they somehow got the whole bike to hang upside _down_. With a _cable_.”

“The dedication,” says Peter.

“The balls.”

“The genius.”

“The sheer dastardry.”

“I wanna see how it’s done.” Peter bites his lip, flush rising instantly to his cheeks, as if he realizes the instant the words leave his mouth just how stupid and brash it sounds, but Harley just shakes his head at him with a wicked smile.

“You just wanna show off. I wanna climb up and see it.”

“But--but--no _superpowers_?”

“There’s gotta be a way they did this without mutated genes,” says Harley.

“Through the sheer force of will and Red Bull, probably,” says Peter.

“Bingo. My mantra. Gimme a boost, man.” Harley’s already unzipping his puffer coat and shedding his layers, shirt and turtleneck riding up over his stomach in his haste.

“This is a bad idea,” Peter intones, as he speedily crouches down with his fingers interlaced for Harley to step onto. “This is a very, very bad idea.”

“This is the _best_ idea. This is why two heads are better than one.”

“Not if the two heads are potatoes,” Peter moans. He makes a show of grunting under Harley’s weight. Harley rolls his eyes and swings for the nearest branch, missing wildly.

“Steady there,” Peter warns him. “Or are your eyes just as bad as your ears now, too?”

“Fuck off,” is Harley’s mumbled response into his scarf. He swings again, and this time his fingernails find purchase in the bark of the bough near his head. He grunts and heaves himself up with little trouble after that, and situates himself with his legs on either side of the branch. He kicks the wheel of the bicycle with his toe and watches it spin with unabashed glee.

“So somebody needed a rope,” Peter muses, craning his neck to stare up at him. “And the other person had to have really, really good upper body strength.”

“Yeah, Parker. It’s called going to the gym.”

“Technically, I think somebody really tall could actually do this on their own.”

“Oh, I promise you, these shenanigans don’t come half-assed. Two people were definitely in on this.”

Peter crosses his arms with a pout. “Come down now so I can have my turn.”

“You gonna catch me, Westley?”

It’s Peter’s turn to roll his eyes. The look is adorable as ever on him. “As you wish, princess.” He unfolds his arms and braces them outward for Harley’s descent.

Harley has often joked to himself before that when Peter says _jump_ , he jumps without a second thought. He never thought that truth would land him in the very literal and physical predicament he finds himself in two seconds later.

One minute he’s shaking his head and grinning cockily down at Pete, and then the next he’s leaping off the bough and flying in the air at a frankly worrying velocity for this height and crash-landing in a bank of snow.

The cold hits him first like a sledgehammer.

“You were supposed to catch me!” Harley hisses. And then, as the pain slices through his forearm: “ _Fuck_!”

“Harley! Harley! Oh my God. Are you okay? Oh, God. I thought you were leaning to the other side and I wasn’t ready, I was so sure you were--can you sit up? Can you sit? Oh God, Oh God--”

Harley doesn’t quite register the reason for Peter’s panicked babbling--he only fell from an average-sized oak tree, after all--until he follows Peter’s white-lipped gaze and slaps his eyes on his very own bendy elbow-arm-wrist contortion.

“Pinch a goggle,” he swears. “Suck a duck.”

“Oh, God,” Peter trills again. “Tony. _God_.” By some humongous miracle he finds the wherewithal to dig for his phone and tap on Tony’s contact.

“We need your help,” Peter stammers as soon as the man picks up.

Tony’s frown is vibratingly audible over the speaker. “The only time you utter those words is if you’re in the grocery store or getting kidnapped. Which, considering that _just_ happened three months ago, I really freaking hope this isn’t a repeat performance.”

Under any other circumstance, both boys would be able to hear the undercurrent of panic behind the veil of Tony’s quips. As it is, they’re both shaking too hard to notice anything. Spidey senses be damned.

“Harley fell out of a tree,” says Peter.

“A tree,” says Tony, and this time there’s a series of clangs in the background like he just signalled to his suit to disassemble. “What the hell were you doing, birdwatching?”

“Something like that,” says Peter. He braces the phone between his shoulder and ear to free up his hands so he can haul Harley up into an upright position on his butt. Harley promptly howls.

“Mary mother of macaroni,” Tony mutters. “I’ll be there in five. Never thought I’d see the day I’d be flying out in Mark 76 to rescue a bunch of chickadee-peepers.”

\--

“You said you were birdwatching,” Tony says as the nanonites peel back into his totally not extra matching jogging set. “This doesn’t look like birdwatching. This looks like total Red Bull-fueled, college-age shenanigans.”

Peter gestures back and forth between Harley and Tony. His mouth opens and closes several times, and then he says with a look of utter closed-eyed defeat: “In our defense, the bike was not ours.”

“No, but the idea was yours,” says Harley, grinning through his tears in a way that makes even Tony’s fingers twitch with a wince.

“I said in _our_ defense, not mine, but go off, I guess,” says Peter petulantly, piling the jacket and sweater back onto his brother. He ties the arms of the turtleneck around Harley’s neck with a bit too much enthusiasm.

Tony’s ogling the arm that Harley is cradling to his chest at a most definitely unnatural angle. “That shit looks broken. Please tell me that shit’s not broken.”

“It’s not broken?” says Peter.

“Oh, Lordy,” says Tony, looking like he’s close to weeping. “At least I have the man upstairs to thank that neither of you inherited my gene for potential alcoholism.”

Harley frowns, momentarily going un-cross-eyed. “Statistically, we don’t share any DNA.”

“And yet statistically, you got my gene for dumbassery”--Tony points at Harley, then at Peter--“and you--well, your DNA’s fucked.”

“Thanks,” says Peter dryly. “So should we, like, order a pizza after we get out of the ER?”

And that’s how they find themselves three hours later in the back of yet another Uber--Tony barely suppressing the wrinkle in his nose as a knee-jerk reaction to the plebeian mode of transportation--and Harley, hopped up on all sorts of drugs and bopping his head against Peter’s shoulder, starts telling them the story for the fourth time of how Simon practically yelled at him for spilling minestrone all over the front of his cashmere sweater.

“It’s gonna be a love story for the ages,” Peter assures him, also for the fourth time that evening. “A city boy and a country mouse. What could go wrong, right?”

Tony snorts from where he’s shoved up against the car door on the other side of Harley’s lolling head. “Cut him some slack, kid. At least he’s not the one dropping his friends from trees and calling it birdwatching.”

“Cold, Mr. Stark. Ice cold.”

“Don’t forget to order the iced tea with th’ pizza,” Harley yawns between them. He thunks his head back on the cushions and nestles deeper into his bundle of outerwear, readjusting the sling on his left arm just before drifting his eyes shut.

Tony pats his thigh with a sniff. “We’ll get you all the iced tea, buddy, don’t worry.” He grimaces to himself. “And we’ll grab a bottle of Pep’s favorite wine on the way back, too. We were in the middle of a very important discussion about our future.”

“Oh, God,” Peter intones flatly. “Don’t tell me you’ve decided to put Kathy to sleep.”

“Kathy,” says Tony, “is a senile house plant, and no, we do not have afternoon discussions about the state of our _ferns_ , Parker.”

“Kathy is the light of my life, and if you so much as think of putting her down, I’m stealing her in the middle of the night and taking her to my apartment.”

“May could never survive the competition,” Tony deadpans.

Peter snorts. The sound is ugly, totally uncouth, but to Tony it’s the most beautiful thing he’s heard from the kid in weeks. 

He reaches around Harley’s headrest to poke Peter in the side of the temple. “Hey. Seems like your gears are up and grinding again lately.”

Peter’s expression softens. It takes him a while to turn his head to face Tony, but when he does, the man doesn’t miss how the kid’s gaze dips down ever so fleetingly first on Harley’s sleeping face between them. He doesn’t miss, either, how Peter subtly shifts his weight, so that with the pull and inertia of the car rounding a turn, Harley’s body folds right into the pocket of warmth at Peter’s chest.

“Yeah,” says Peter, and it sounds like it carries the weight of a thousand things unsaid, a weight that Tony finds he doesn’t mind. “Harley’s been helping.”

Tony can’t resist. “More than Kathy the houseplant?”

Peter looks like he’s about to roll his eyes as an automatic reaction to the jest, but he doesn’t. Instead, he opts for, “Yup. Loads more.”

Tony settles his gaze fondly on the flip of that single dusty golden curl on Harley’s brow. Some of the hairs on his right eyebrow are jutting straight up, as if he messed them up too much while fidgeting back in the ER. He’s a mess, objectively. A total, drooling, slack-jawed, foul-mouthed mess who mismatches his sneakers far too often. But a beautiful mess.

“I’m glad you have each other,” says Tony. The _miscreants_ is all but implicit in his tone.

Peter shoots him a grin. “And I’m glad we have you.”

“Wow, Webhead, is that actual sincerity from you I hear?”

“And I’m glad we have your credit card, because the American healthcare system is so messed up and that ER bill is gonna be through the roof.”

“...Aaand there it is.”

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings: Harley has depressive thoughts and suicide ideation throughout; he mentions his father's physical and emotional abuse toward him; Peter encounters a side character who attempts suicide but does not follow through; and there are bits of negative self-directed talk sprinkled throughout reflecting some of the characters' POV's.
> 
> So the thing with the bikes is a real thing!! I teach at Notre Dame and students literally toss bikes up into the tree branches during finals week. The first time I saw it, I went "wtf" to my friend and he was all calm like "what" and when i pointed to the very concerning Huffy bike hanging upside down from a branch by a metal cable he just lost it at my face. I hate him. (jk we're very good queer buddies but I will never admit it to his face)
> 
> I feel like this one was an easy one to write. I think that writing Harley and Peter's relationship has gotten so familiar to me in a way that their dialogue and thought processes are kind of second nature to me now? Anywho, what was your favorite part? Which part hurt the most? When did you smile the widest? I wanna know it alllll
> 
> Thanks for reading my darling chicklets and i love you <3 -kaleb
> 
> muh tumblr: theoceanismyinkwell  
> muh insta: kc.barrie
> 
> The fic where Peter and Harley meet at a precinct: [These Angels See the Light](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22183174)  
> The fic where Harley goes deaf: [Talk to Shooting Stars](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23833573) (lowkey my magnum opus)  
> The fic where Peter is rescued from kidnapping and torture: [To the Ends of the Earth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23487952)


End file.
